well i'm john berman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. as fiscal cliff negotiations continue will republicans strike a compromise with democrats and do what's best for the country or ticket tea party type hardline stance that will doom the economy also big drought super storm systems and above average temperatures are just some of the devastating effects of climate change but there are still those who say this is all normal climate change is still just one big made up myth or the deniers up to now and new reports out

suggest that chemicals from halliburton's highly controversial fracking process are killing the livestock nationwide but the government stop this dangerous practice before we all die from fracking related food poisoning. president obama just won reelection to the white house with a margin of about fifty one percent of the popular vote about the same number he won by in two thousand and eight the last president to win both election and reelection by fifty one percent or greater was dwight d. eisenhower in the elections in one thousand nine hundred two in one hundred fifty six so apparently both obama and eisenhower were doing something right that a clear majority the american people liked but what could that be we're all pretty familiar with the platform on which obama won reelection but what about eyes you know well a simple read of the republican party's nine hundred fifty six platform gives you

all the answers you need they started out by noting that the republican party of nine hundred fifty six was in support of all the people not just the millionaires and the corporations they wrote our government was created. by the people for all the people animals serve no less a purpose we are proud of and shall continue our far reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs expansion of social security really broadened coverage and unemployment insurance while whole improved housing and better health protection for all our people we are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people. first this was before paul ryan was born i could as republican buddies also like to the idea of being part of an international peacekeeping body we continue vigorously to support the united nations they wrote in their platform john bolton's head is exploding as

we speak when it comes to working people the republicans back in the one nine hundred fifty s. knew that as they wrote their party's platform government must have a heart as well as a head that meant they said support for working people they said under the republican administration as our country has prospered so have its people this is as it should be for as president eisenhower said labor is the united states the men and women with their minds their hearts and hands create the wealth that is shared in this country they are america went on to say that prefer the record of performance of the republican administration on behalf of our working men and women goes still further the federal minimum wage has been raised for more than two million workers social security has been extended to an additional ten million workers and the benefits raged for six and a half million the protection of unemployment insurance has been brought to four

million additional workers the republican party of one hundred fifty six then set out a set of goals for the next four years in the party platform. those goals included efforts to continue and further perfect its birth programs of assistance to the millions of workers with special employment problems such as older workers handicapped workers members of minority groups and migratory workers so that they would protect by law the assets of employee welfare and benefit plans no more raids by being capital so that workers who are the beneficiaries can be assured of their rightful benefits they said they would extend the protection of the federal minimum wage laws to as many more workers as is possible and practicable all their freaking out and build the wal-mart borders right now they said they would continue to fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race creed color national origin and says three or sex somebody wake up pat buchanan he's

passed out they said that the protection of the right of workers to organize it to unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the eisenhower administration. wow republicans in one nine hundred fifty six would not have recognized the war on women being waged by the tribal diets in today's party they supported the equal rights amendment which still to this day hasn't passed saying in one hundred fifty six we recommend to congress the submission of a constitutional amendment providing equal rights for men and women. they also knew how to stimulate the economy by quote launching the ten year seven hundred eighty five million dollar mission sixty six parks improvement program and in the spirit of teddy roosevelt instead of privatizing government assets they expanded government land they bragged that they had quote added more than four hundred thousand acres to our national park system and ninety thousand acres to while they

run wildlife refuges and were working to quote protect reserved areas of all types and to provide increased staffs and operating funds for public recreation agencies . eisenhower and as party one hundred fifty six understood that america is fundamentally a center left nation and so they supported many of those positions as president eisenhower wrote to his brother edgar in one hundred fifty four letter should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things among them are h.l. hunt you possibly know his background a few of the texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas their number is negligible and they are stupid it looks like that negligible number of stupid people has taken over the republican party today led by the hunt brothers successors the koch brothers the question for today is the

republican party infighting spills over onto the national stage is whether the go back to the center left positions of eisenhower and start winning elections again or if they'll double down on stupid to satisfy the koch's a don't since murdock's in limbaugh's of their party. joining me now to discuss more about this is tommy christopher a white house correspondent for media i welcome back thanks for having time to have you with us let me play what grover norquist had to say this weekend about this this issue in general your. cheap party cho is going to dwarf tea party one if obama pushes this off the cleric . tea party to really tea party is it probable i mean is there that much reserve crazy out there in the republican right wing a sphere well yeah i mean there's certainly enough there loud enough and dumb enough sure but i don't think they'll have the impact that the original keep your

party had because it's a different world now you know at the time you know they could get angry and stomp their feet and the country could sort of relate to it because they were still feeling that you know the bush recession misery that's going away now and you know hopefully will continue to go away and so you know when these people say that the sky is falling and people aren't feeling it you know it'll be all the more apparent i mean they've already lost the argument and i don't think anything is going to happen it's going to it's going to be with them that argument will boehner came out today and say ok you you know the president you you said how you want to raise taxes and told us if we want to cut things to give you details here's the details and then he proceeded to say raise medicare retirement eligibility age by two years slow down the cost of living adjustments on social security that was basically screw every social security recipient from now forever and you know gradually shrink that program down and then he had a bunch of guidelines or targets with no specifics whatsoever how long the

republicans think they can play this game and at what point are americans going to go watch really you know i mean it well what is it december third it was just a few weeks ago that mitt romney lost on basically that same plan on saying well you know we're going to cut all these deductions and save all this money raise all this revenue and just trust me on the details and people said no and then this is coming boehner coming back with it that's why i think you know and i hate it when liberals give try to give republicans going to buy it because i don't want them to have good advice i don't you know i don't have any interest in them recovering from this but i mean really you know they are showing no signs of progressing what they're trying to do is just put some racing. on the same old crap and you know that's fine with me i mean you know it may fool some of the people but the problem is that it's like i said before if they've already lost the argument. my friend matt lewis who works the daily caller i think you know he says that the g.o.p. needs to modernize and not moderate but the problem is that you know sure you know

they they could modernize and for instance stop being anti choice instead doesn't that make sense like promote contraception and you know try and reduce the number of abortions etc but the democrats are already doing that better anything that the g.o.p. can do. it more in a more modern fashion then cats are already doing better and anything that they can do on the fiscal side you know there are the democrats you know much of this year and of a lot of liberals already talking on the garbage so they really have nothing to offer you know what you can go to the guns and gays and all that sort of business and i mean the offer that the democrats are already and increasingly people are not afraid that obama is going to take their guns and they're not terrified of gay people any longer he apparently is not going to take their guns yeah yeah. hey you know i want to have an amtrak no probs national parks no problem any oakley on you're on your way. what do you know in one thousand nine hundred six the republican party was openly pro-labor and all that stuff i was like really was gay

married to yeah. i like on it well you know it was very cold waters so you don't have to be straight to shoot straight there you know i mean that you know there would let you know allowing people to have their own private lives is actually an old republican ethic so what what made that transition of for the republican party from the party of fifty six that actually said we're going to have bragged about increasing so security increasing unemployment benefits increasing the minimum wage all those things to the republican party it's a day where you know they last year basically blackmailed obama with the debt ceiling into cutting unemployment from ninety nine to seventy four weeks well you know from my armchair i think this all sort of started to occur in the eighty's you know. we had reagan. that was the first time when you know what i was a kid you know people thought guys would complain about taxes but they would complain about paying their taxes they were sort of proud to pay their taxes but who complained about as you know what the government not you know getting a good good good bang for the buck kind of wasting the money two thousand dollars

toilets you know in the eighty's you know it became you know. themselves are a bad thing and then you know you had the republican young guns like grover norquist for example. you know who just sort of took that issue and seized upon it and made it their you know they raise money that kind of bought into judo and skis to santa claus theory and decided to go to santa claus the tax cuts you know and they've been doing that for thirty years it didn't work it's not working anymore it seems like there was yeah and that's fine with me yeah ok tell me christopher thanks for being with us tonight thanks very much always great to have. coming up every second every second of two point four million pounds of carbon pollution are being pumped into the atmosphere warming the planet and having disastrous effects on our environment is a startling statistic enough to make climate change deniers wise up to the perils of global warming.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call i don't know. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about what you. are you know what that is my hair so if you want to give us a feature here is a liberal the price point you. can usually go to but it's going to look for you to distract us from what you and i should care about because they're profit driven industry. that's. garbage he calls it breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to break that.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

in screw news more bad news or planet earth rather than decreasing the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere year to year we're all increasing a new study released by the global current project consortium finds that carbon emissions around the world increase three percent from last year rising to three hundred eighty two billion tons of carbon roughly two point four million pounds of carbon pollution every single second according the study's author at the authors at this rate of pollution the earth's temperature could rise anywhere from seven to eleven degrees fahrenheit by twenty one hundred bringing with it more frequent there are rising oceans and worldwide famine. right now world leaders are meeting in doha as part of a u.n. effort to curb climate change but can we really expect serious progress on global manmade climate change when the issue itself is still up for debate in the united states thanks to all funding climate change deniers assess marc morano he's the

chief executive editor in chief correspondent at climate depot dot com martin it's nice to see you thanks for joining us here live in person with thing that you have a radio for years and years. you were described by a german magazine as the godfather of climate change is so the mastermind of the so you heard the intro we're producing two and a half million pounds of carbon pollution every second the planet is heating up how do you guys keep taking money from the fossil fuel industry and pushing this first of all talk about the oil funded i'm over eighty percent of our the nations are from single donors you don't get industry funds my brother's life and. the way i go i go on my conscience i do what i want and follow investigative journalist so just answer a question and see if there's quite literally hundreds of factors that influence global temperature everything from tilt to the earth's axis to ocean cycles the water vapor methane volcanic dust the solar system sun clouds land use policies and

to sit there two point four million right of way carbon assegai but that's a trace essential gas in the atmosphere that doesn't match up well that geologically it's not something four million pounds and you know what it means nothing so you're still here still taking the position like we can't prove that this tobacco caused the cancer it's not about proving anything this what we're facing now is first of all sixteen years without warming but i don't put a lot of stock in that because that's quite the u.n. deadline that's the last time they are we are warming continuously well not according to the u.n. data in the satellites so that ninety eight at that point it's warming has stalled even the national proceeding that's still. peer reviewed study in the nasa seems that speeding up no it's not speeding up is it's a stall the last ten years but again the point. hundreds of factors all the new studies in fact the reason they're talking about extreme weather is because the temperature is not i say god bless the thousand plus coal plants they're going to bring it on the developing world that's what they're going to that's the new plan more carbon they have absolutely the people it's the most humane moral choice

global warming this is big science you know that tom believe it could be called to be in addition to reducing carbon which is which is heating up and destroyed when it's the middle part is part of what i was the last word out of this natural gas is going great with fracking in terms of atmospheric emissions and that's why what do you see the way the u.s. emissions are down global emissions are up what he is saying and i know that china is not a political but what do you say to people in need in new jersey who lost their homes to hurricane sandy i say hurricanes happen for you even beyond that like this for you to even bring up hurricanes we're going the longest period without a major category three or larger hurricane making landfall since at least one thousand nine hundred eighty s. the one water hitting us are much bigger the atmosphere has fired listen to her and it's i think it is just a two thousand mile down on her i was going to tornadoes coming across they're not having the big tornadoes are down dramatically since the one nine hundred fifty s. your fifty's which are idolizing with the progressive eisenhower had much worse tornadoes then we could even contemplate a new study out on drought trend in droughts at least eighty five years new study

out on the floods what are you talking about right now sixty years old around the stadium you get a drop target change in and out trends though if you go back far enough sure you can pick a trend from the last twenty years you can do all that kind of i'm saying look at this over a century at least fifty year timescale it's not there the evidence not only is not there it's the other way the other way you know heartland has to got two hundred grand earlier from the koch brothers to to pump this information out through twelve students so i know the information you know this guy did i got there it's about time kids are going you know probably there is such nonsense to be told i should probably with all of that is islands yes with what the u.n. and e.p.a. and most public schools are teaching kids and. showing gore's film please the heartland needs that quadruple and go ten times one hundred times a budget kids are being deceived major disservice you watch children's by being told that we should worry about the pollution in the air absolutely yes you're talking about if you're talking about carbon dioxide that's not

a pollutant if you're talking about the bio diesel is a pollution not if you don't try it is a pollutant of the in the spring or backed him up the supreme court said the e.p.a. may regulate under that instead they sure as hell isn't it's a pollutant because it causes global warming and did stablished and it's something we in hell after that we exhale c o two things back o. causes cancer absolutely so you know many of these same scientists who are denying global warming were really saying science is twenty thirty years ago now there is some people for your back to back in those days and these guys were all going to look at you know so you know most of the studies are secondhand smoke and didn't like what they saw with the e.p.a. it was done for political purposes on the impact of second hand smoke but no one's out there saying that's just a smear in fact how is it different how what different how how is it by traces a gas yes we exhale you're comparing the tobacco smoke now yet you sound like a republican leader boehner who said c o two was a carcinogen why don't you just claim that he meant to say pollutant at the time he got really killed for it but that's what you're dangerously close to going to the bottom line is i think president obama agrees with me at these un summits it's

george w. obama he hasn't changed appreciably from what george bush has done in any of these summits he didn't push for cap and trade i was there in copenhagen when they said climate change president obama is not here now his e.p.a. may ultimately do it to him to do something about it i don't hear saying no bill actually refreshing lee surprised that obama has been so lackluster i say it's more of a checkbox issue for him and i think it has to be the american people are interested in most if you've got a rubber getting about university of pennsylvania he's a liberal democrat he says global warming isn't even the top ten environmental issues let alone other issues and he's very harshly critical of gore so many scientists deadest rank or another left of center physicist from canada they're all saying what is it what is the reason why space was. because sea levels are actually going up to the level that it was that he that came out from steven ramps were they they're comparing apples to oranges they have this satellite data and they can convert it from the land based stuff and he's just got that studies being torn apart this idea is to all of it or it's absent in the routes and the american

people know the polling the other shows it well those who watch fox news nobody of our overall market thanks for being smart. sticking to environmental horrors is fracking responsible for killing off an alarm in amount of livestock around the nation authors of a new report looked into twenty four seven different case studies in six different states where hydraulic fracking is taking place to find out why livestock is getting sick and dying their conclusion is the fracking chemicals for example in louisiana the study found seventeen cows that died after being exposed to spilled fracking chemicals for only one hour in central pennsylvania about one hundred forty cattle were exposed to fracking chemicals after and in western pennsylvania after a nearby pond used by pregnant cows was contaminated with fracking chemical after half of those calves born were dead and if this is what fracking is doing to the animals what might it be doing to people as the study's authors expose livestock are making their way into the food system and it's very worrisome they live in

areas that have tested positive for air water and soil contamination some of these chemicals could appear in milk and meat products made from these animals several nations in europe of already banned fracking including france and bulgaria well the u.k. has suspended the practice but here in the u.s. fracking continues in the face of new evidence that it's killing livestock and perhaps poisoning our food supply elizabeth royte joins me now she is an environmental writer at the nation magazine whose latest article is titled fracking our food supply and she's the author of the book bottled mania big business local springs in the battle over america's drinking water liz with a welcome thank you tell us the story of jackie shake for show that he's healthy. he's a fifty three year. old rancher she lives with her husband steve in the northwest corner of north dakota she's been ranching for about ten years she's got she never let the oil and gas companies on her property but a couple years ago one of them put a rig on her property line there's thirty two other rigs around within three miles

of her property but when they put this one on the property line there was a blowout there was some problems with a leaky well and she started noticing problems with their cattle they started limping they had infections they dropped from sixty to eighty pounds a week the mothers stopped producing milk for their cats and in five of the cattle their tails dropped off eventually five of them died actually one very expensive ball had to be shot and four other cows died while and it is there is there are. pretty clear evidence that this is the consequence of fracking ever going to and presumably contaminated the water to keep the cattle or drinking that's the problem it's very difficult to prove cause and effect in these cases we don't know what's in all of these fracking fluids jacki schilke the like most ranchers hadn't done pre-drilling testing over water for air of her soil you don't know how these chemicals are moving through the environment but ranchers across the country are are noting similar things with their animals i'm not saying that this is an alarming widespread trend i want to be careful here i want to say that scientists

who have looked at this are worried and this might be an early warning for us looking at these cattle who are dying of respiratory failure who are. who are dying of infections massive organ failure and those are the animals who are not making their way into the food system but what about their herd mates who have survived and might be sick but aren't stumbling around and who are making it into the food so people who are drinking milk and eating. meat products but this is not a bob versus limited to cattle is fracking around chicken farms everything else. the food that people are eating may itself be contaminated with with carcinogens with. you know oil derivatives and things is for a question it's another part of this great unknown because farmers aren't required to tell the people they sell their cattle to. if they're healthy if if they can make it into the truck and they look healthy then they go on to the feedlot or to

be raised up to market weight somewhere else so farmers are responsible for the insides of their cows if they look at on the outside on they go and at the slaughterhouses where where they are inspected the inspectors are mostly concerned with pathogens and with pesticides and they're looking at gross anatomy they are not testing for the residue of fracking chemicals so we really don't know what's going on amazing now when fracking was first rolled out i believe halliburton developed this process dick cheney basically pushed through or pushed around or whatever the exemption so that the p.a. could not find out what the fracking chemicals were and this wouldn't be covered by the clean air clean water rules correct me if i'm wrong on that. do you. know you're exactly right thanks to cheney there are exemptions from. from parts of the clean water act the clean air act the safe drinking water act the toxics release inventory the resource recovery act so that. crackers can

kind of make these discharges into the environmentalist but they're not in violation of the law elizabeth we just have thirty seconds left i'm sorry for the time is there any possibility that we're going to start regulating for. oh yes already we are e.p.a. has tightened the air emissions regulations they're studying water and i think there is going to be tighter regulation coming let's hope the regulations are enforced and that we start to allocate a lot more money toward studying the potential impacts of these emissions and contaminants through the food system into plants and animals yeah yeah this is this is a very very big concern elizabeth royte thanks so much for being with us tonight you're welcome. after the break. it's bad enough that american big oil companies have so much influence our political system but now the foreign oil companies are invading our democracy to who is really bankrolling america's largest oil lobbying group and how are they able to pull it off.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. her.